Oprah's recent Book Club pick, American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins, has raised a firestorm of controversy. The book, published in early 2020, was hailed by the publisher as this generation's Grapes of Wrath and according to Kirkus review "intensely suspenseful and deeply humane, this novel makes migrants seeking to cross the southern U.S. border indelibly individual" The push back came from Latinx authors, activists and journalists who took issue with stereotypes and tropes about Mexicans seeking asylum in the United States.
Exacerbating the outrage at Oprah's choice is the fact that the author Jeanine Cummins was born in Rota Spain and is of Irish descent. In other words, she is telling someone else's story through her dominant culture perspective. Therefore the novel does not have an authentic voice as a person's lived experience. The New York Times article, "Critics of Oprah Book Club Title Put New Novel on Trial" goes into great detail about the criticism of the book and Oprah's frustration with having to defend her choice. Subsequent to the program organized to allow people to air their concerns and responses Oprah promised to have more Latinx authors represented among her Book Club choices. I'm not convinced that while she called this discussion a seminal moment Oprah and others see how deeply this issue goes in the publishing world.
Our work this year in the Library has focused on the Include Shared Foundation of the AASL National Standards for School Libraries. As we were working on a "crosswalk" of skills and inquiry projects, the blank spaces on our Google Sheets in the "Include" column were glaring. We decided that this would be our focus for the year. We thought we were being intentional about diverse representation in our library collections and instruction. Was that true? How would we even begin? Because just like Jeanine Cummins, I learned that while I can speak about the reasons that someone of another race or culture cannot authentically write about someone else's lived experiences, I too cannot speak as one of those under-represented voices. Once before, I was asked to work with teachers to help them select books for their classrooms and curriculum that did not perpetuate Native American stereotypes. At that time I returned to the best practices in libraries and considered the evaluation criteria we use, looking for the #ownvoices that were so hard to find.
With all of this in mind I decided to do an informal audit of books in the collection to determine if we truly had a diverse collection. The audit is still in process. We are also looking at our collection development policies and book challenge policy to ensure that when these books are in the collection, they remain there in spite of others best efforts to remove them. Back to my earlier point though, the problem is that books with diverse main characters written by diverse authors are still not being published in the numbers that would be representative of the populations we serve. We cannot buy or recommend books that are not there. When the publisher of American Dirt was challenged to develop a division for Latinx writers and books, the response was not to divide the stories but to bring them all forward. Clearly this is still not happening in the numbers that it should.
I certainly do not have all the answers and stumble along knowing that multiple copies of books by Kwame Alexander and Jason Reynolds, while responsive, does not make for a "diverse" or representative collection. I still have much work to do to put my own collection in order. I was a bit surprised though to learn that a person with so much power to elevate the discussion, fell into the same trap of believing that anyone in the dominant culture can tell anyone else's story. That, in my opinion, is simply not true.
Our work this year in the Library has focused on the Include Shared Foundation of the AASL National Standards for School Libraries. As we were working on a "crosswalk" of skills and inquiry projects, the blank spaces on our Google Sheets in the "Include" column were glaring. We decided that this would be our focus for the year. We thought we were being intentional about diverse representation in our library collections and instruction. Was that true? How would we even begin? Because just like Jeanine Cummins, I learned that while I can speak about the reasons that someone of another race or culture cannot authentically write about someone else's lived experiences, I too cannot speak as one of those under-represented voices. Once before, I was asked to work with teachers to help them select books for their classrooms and curriculum that did not perpetuate Native American stereotypes. At that time I returned to the best practices in libraries and considered the evaluation criteria we use, looking for the #ownvoices that were so hard to find.
With all of this in mind I decided to do an informal audit of books in the collection to determine if we truly had a diverse collection. The audit is still in process. We are also looking at our collection development policies and book challenge policy to ensure that when these books are in the collection, they remain there in spite of others best efforts to remove them. Back to my earlier point though, the problem is that books with diverse main characters written by diverse authors are still not being published in the numbers that would be representative of the populations we serve. We cannot buy or recommend books that are not there. When the publisher of American Dirt was challenged to develop a division for Latinx writers and books, the response was not to divide the stories but to bring them all forward. Clearly this is still not happening in the numbers that it should.
I certainly do not have all the answers and stumble along knowing that multiple copies of books by Kwame Alexander and Jason Reynolds, while responsive, does not make for a "diverse" or representative collection. I still have much work to do to put my own collection in order. I was a bit surprised though to learn that a person with so much power to elevate the discussion, fell into the same trap of believing that anyone in the dominant culture can tell anyone else's story. That, in my opinion, is simply not true.